With the tablet becoming more popular with the home PC/Mac be phased out?

After watching the Microsoft press conference recently announcing the Surface tablet I had a bit of a dilemma. I thought to myself “If i never used my PC for business why would i need anything other than a tablet?”. The tablets are packed with all kinds of apps that cover everything from gaming, social networking and basic word processing so what is the purpose of having a bulky laptop or a desktop PC for the average casual user? This is a question that i couldn’t answer. Take the Apple iPad for example its small, lightweight, has a nicely sized display and half the price of a (good) laptop but still has all the features in a much more streamlined to the point operating system. With the add-on of a Bluetooth keyboard it would be perfect for replacing a laptop.

I think within 2/5 years the home computer will be obsolete to the tablet with Apple leading the way.

Cons
Plastic mount instead of metal. Be careful with it and it’ll last you a while. But don’t drop it!

This is the lightest EF lens of all at a mere 4.6 oz. (130g). Compact and high-performance, standard lens. Its Gaussian optics provides sharp delineation from near to far focusing distances.

The color balance is excellent for a standard lens.
This lens performs great in low light conditions, close ups and portraits.

The 50mm f/1.8 is also know for the beautiful blurred background also known as (bokeh ). I have owned this lens since 2008 and have used it in low light; shooting headshots, before and after beauty makeovers for fashion shows and performance was great.

The only thing I wished that it was USM like the 50mm f/1.4. The lens is more bangs for the buck, but has a plastic feel to it. I am in the cosmetology field whereas head shots are used as posters, calendars and shop catalogs and the 50mm really is a winner.

I would certainly recommend this lens to all my friends and colleagues in the photography field.

This lens is a MUST HAVE lens if you own a Canon D-SLR and an ideal first lens.

Microsoft surprised the tech world Thursday — and ruffled a few journalistic feathers — when it announced a product-unveiling event with only four days notice. The invitation’s language was absurdly lacking in detail, provoking a sense of mystery and anticipation, but also compelling journalists to ask whether a plane trip to Los Angeles was necessary to see the grand unveiling of, well, who knows what.

Indeed, Microsoft’s event invitation didn’t provide many clues, beyond this near-meaningless advisory: “This will be a major Microsoft announcement — you will not want to miss it.”

First off, the event is in Los Angeles. This isn’t exactly the tech capital of the world, but it is our global entertainment capital, so we have to expect that something about the announcement is Hollywood-related.

To provoke the press corps even further, Microsoft refused to share the location of the event until Monday morning at 10 a.m. This is a problem, as Los Angeles is not San Francisco or New York — the town is the definition of sprawl. So if you were a reporter who arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday, you had to take your chances on a hotel location, and hope your lodgings were close to the event.

Well, right on cue at 10 a.m., Microsoft announced that the event would be held at Milk Studios, located at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and Cahuenga Blvd. This is near Paramount Studios and the Hollywood Forever cemetery — which reinforces speculation that the event is media-focused. Or somehow relates to zombies.

The event itself is believed to be the launching point for a Microsoft tablet, according to TechCrunch’s unnamed sources. If the rumored tablet is heavy on media delivery via rumored Xbox Live streaming, the Los Angeles location actually makes sense. Studio heads love a home-field advantage to share their content.

The Xbox Live service has undergone a media renaissance lately, with the service launching Comcast and HBOGO video-on-demand apps. Of course, the console has had media center capabilities from day one, and the Netflix app has been available on Xbox Live for years. But breaking from the console, and streaming all this Xbox Live content to a tablet, could be a very interesting development for people who’ve already bought into Microsoft’s streaming ecosystem.

There have also been rumors that Microsoft’s recent investment in Barnes & Noble will play a part into today’s announcement. The $300 million investment gives Microsoft a 17.6 percent stake in the book seller’s e-reader company. So, if Microsoft were to release a tablet with any sort of e-reader capabilities, it would make sense for Barnes & Noble to be part of that event.

But alas, according to Dow Jones, Barnes and Noble will not be participating in today’s event. And a spokesperson for the book seller confirmed with Business Insider that B&N isn’t making any announcements today.

A last-minute rumor from a site called shifted2u.com involves a press release for a product called Xbox Surface. The release details two pieces of hardware — a Tablet Computing Device and a Stationary Computing Device. If the news is legit, the tablet will ship with a 7-inch, 1280×720 touch screen with a custom IBM engine for “scale-out workloads” and a paltry 288MB — that’s right, megabytes — of RLDRAM.

The “Stationary Computing Device” will be powered by two IBM Power7 SCMs with six active cores. Fun fact: IBM Power7 chips are IBM’s high-end server chips. Imagine that, a high-end server processing workloads in your living room. The system will also get 5GB of LRDIMM RAM. This is curious given that you can only buy 16GB LRDIMM RAM modules, and that 5GB is an odd number for the amount of RAM on any device.

The icing on the cake is the inclusion of a 250GB, 10,000rpm 2.5-inch SCSI drive. Finally, SCSI is making a comeback.

If Microsoft unveils a tablet today, it would mark the company’s first foray into branded, Windows-running computer hardware. Sure, the company has a rich history in manufacturing computer mice, but currently the the Xbox is the only piece of Microsoft hardware that’s tied to Microsoft software. Direct computer/software integration has worked splendidly for Apple — and now it could work for Microsoft too.

Oddly, Microsoft is also holding a Windows Phone-related event in San Francisco on Wednesday. For journalists who cover the company, it’s a frequent flier miles bonanza — assuming their editors are willing to send reporters up and down California.

But the timing also begs a few questions: Why couldn’t Microsoft just have one event? The Wednesday event was already scheduled, so why add a second event hundreds of miles away? Does a new tablet really justify dragging everyone to LA? We’ll know soon enough. But if Microsoft uses today’s event to announce its Yammer acquisition, be prepared for a huge, collective groan from the press corps, and a lot of very angry journalists waiting for their flights home in LAX.

This one would have been higher on the list, if only it didn’t remain so limited. FaceTime is a great idea from Apple which remains hamstrung by hardware and network limitations. Video clarity is still at the mercy of your network connection, and while 3G will help to extend the platform, it won’t be anywhere near its potential.

Three things will need to happen for FaceTime to truly take off on iOS- 4G broadband must become readily available, data charges must come down or limits must be raised, and battery life needs to be such that your device can handle a prolonged video chat without the need for an immediate re-charge.

That, in brief, is what Apple will be rolling out to its users over the next six months. The company announced these updates, and a bunch of other significant if not surprising news, during a keynote presentation Monday kicking off its annual developers’ conference.

The most impressive new product announced Monday may be a new MacBook laptop with a high-resolution display that Apple says will contain 5 million pixels — 3 million more than an HD television.

“The new MacBook Pro is the most advanced Mac we have ever built,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The new “retina display” MacBook Pro measures 15.5 inches across and contains an Intel quad-core i7 processor. It will feature up to 16GB of memory and up to 768GB of internal flash storage, Marketing Vice President Phil Schiller told attendees. It goes on sale today.

Schiller said the new computer’s display — similar to the one in the company’s newest iPad — is the highest-resolution display of any notebook, or simple laptop, on the market. Users will get up to 7 hours of battery life, he said.

The laptop is about .7 inches thick and weighs less than 4.5 pounds — about the size and weight of a MacBook Air, he said. Prices for the new MacBook Pro will start at $2,199 for a model with 8GB of memory.

Schiller also unveiled other MacBook Pros without high-res displays but with processors he said will be 60% faster than current models. The 13-inch model will sell for $1,199 to $1,499, depending on storage, while the 15-inch will be $1,799 to $2,199. They start shipping today, he said.

Schiller also introduced MacBook Air laptops with faster, new-generation Intel core processors. Prices for the 11-inch MacBook Air range from $999 to $1,199 — $100 less than before — while the 14-inch is $1,199 and $1,499. They also become available today, which explains why Apple’s online store was down Monday morning.

There was no word Monday on retina-display screens for the MacBook Air.

“The products we make, combined with the apps that you create, can fundamentally change the world,” Cook told developers in closing the keynote. “And, really, I can’t think of a better reason for getting up in the morning.”